


entropy (the last living rose)

by neville



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Angst, Biologist Steve, Body Horror, Bruce Banner Needs a Hug, Character Death, Dubious Science, Exploration, Genetic Disorders & Abnormalities, Genetics, Heavy Angst, Horror, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Inspired by Annihilation (2018), M/M, POV Second Person, POV Steve Rogers, Past Bruce Banner/Thor - Freeform, Past Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Past Character Death, Science Fiction, carol has her shit together im telling u, i promise this is a wild ride, it's very intense, there's lots of science. it may all be dubious. i do not know science, this is basically just annihilation, you're in for a Ride with this one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-10
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2020-04-24 07:16:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19168405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neville/pseuds/neville
Summary: Based on the film "Annihilation". With nothing left to lose, Steve Rogers embarks into Area X, only to find himself forming an intensely close relationship with Bruce Banner as they descend into a world that makes less and less sense.





	entropy (the last living rose)

**Author's Note:**

> so, i watched the film "annihilation" twice, and then the first line of this fic popped into my head as it is now - and it came in second person, so i decided to write the whole thing in second person. i know it's a very divisive point of view, but it felt like the right one to go for in this fic, so i hope you don't mind! it was a very emotional writing process and i enjoyed it deeply, and i hope you enjoy it, too! 
> 
> this fic is based on both the film and a copy of the film script i was able to find online, so some scenes are based on that. some lines are also lifted from the film - you might recognise them! but also i decided to make some changes, too. i wanted to do something different for these characters.
> 
> just a heads up that this fic includes character death and violence!

**** You didn’t know that Dr. Bruce Banner had tattoos, but the first thing you notice when you approach him is the double helix behind his ear. He’s standing aside from everyone else, a nomad, and leaning over the railing, watching the rainbow of the Shimmer shiver out in the distance. There’s something about the intensity of his gaze that irrevocably draws you, and you get up, crossing the space between you. His energy is turbulent, the heaviness in the air before a thunderstorm, and you’ve felt that feeling before. It’s why you’re here. 

You don’t feel as if you can start a conversation with a lightning rod with “hi”, but it’s all you know. It brings him out of his thoughts and to you, his gaze surprisingly light. The rest of him is like a charcoal drawing, but he looks at you with a steady ease, unlike the twitch in his hands. 

“Hi,” he says. You take a swig of your beer and it seems to deepen his smile. There’s something behind it, but you don’t know how to read the emotion because you don’t think you’ve ever seen it before. You cough, and take your view back to the sprawling green, the ecology that leads right up to the prismatic door. You’d call it a wall, but people walk right through it, and so it isn’t; but neither is it a colour to the air, and so you feel that it’s a doorway, a shift from here to there. It’s the reason you’re here. You watch it every night. 

“You’re going into the Shimmer?” you ask. You wonder how hard he fought for this. 

“Yeah,” he says. “I need to see it. It’s important.” 

You nod. You know that sense of desire, that yearning, the repeated dream of passing through the haze of bleached-out colours and into the beyond, of seeing what nobody knows. All of you have it, all of your team, the semi-suicidal urge to discover at costs you can never truly fathom. That’s what his intensity is, you realise: you can feel the pressure of his want in the air, and you wonder if the Shimmer swallowed something he loved. Some _ one _ . Maybe in one of those early crews, before anyone knew what this thing was, a yawning parasite emerging from the ground zero of a lighthouse. But you shouldn’t speculate.

“Glad to have you on the team,” you say. “I’m Steve.” 

“Bruce,” he says, but you already know this. Everybody knows this. His face is being printed in science textbooks as you speak, and you wonder again why he’s here, ready to cross into the doomed unknown. Something stirs in you at the thought of the strength it took for him to be here, the heaviness that you can feel sits in his chest like an anchor. When you shake his hand, you jolt from static shock, and you grin at him, that apologetic one. You want to know everything about him, and you know you never will, and it thrills you. A part of you knows that he can read this from you, and another part just doesn’t care. He looks faintly amused. “You want to know why I’m here, don’t you? This famous, and I’d still kill myself. I said it was important.” 

“It’s important to all of us for different reasons,” you say, but you don’t push. He takes a drink of your beer. 

“Tell me yours and I’ll tell you mine,” he says. He knows you won’t tell him. He turns back to the view. You can’t blame him. 

It’s everything. 

He shows up at your bedroom that night, and you know you didn’t tell him which it was, so he must’ve looked. His breaths are short as he walks in, and he lets you undress him. You’re slow, deliberately, and ghost your fingers across his skin and watch him gasp, and you’re waiting for the moment that you make him go, force the knees beneath him to buckle. You are both going to die sometime soon, and you want to see him without that frame of pain. 

He has more tattoos: one that you noticed earlier, the symbol of Caduceus on the side of his wrist; but there is one here where only you can see it, an equation just beneath his collarbone. You don’t recognise it. It’s dark, still fresh. You don’t touch it. It feels sacred. 

He lies on your bed, and you kiss every inch of his skin as if he is a God prostrate in your sheets; to you, he is. You’re not sure why. Perhaps it’s been so long that you need something to hold onto besides the knowledge that in a week you will be inside. He lets you take your time; he reaches a hand up, and touches the side of your face, and you didn’t know his hands were so rough but callouses bump against your skin. 

“Steve,” he murmurs. 

You make love to him, and you would never call a fling that but it  _ isn’t _ : he is absolutely stunning beneath you in ways you don’t know how to describe, and a part of you feels as if he is breathing life into you when he pulls you down to kiss him deeply. He’s loud, hitched gasps and cadences, and every time you find a rhythm he likes you change it, and he puddles beneath you. You know that he’s close when he grasps for your hands, and you let him take them, let him squeeze against you as his voice cracks and he comes. You didn’t even need to touch him. He lays back against the mattress and  _ breathes _ , and you kiss his chest a little, then the chapped lips of his mouth. 

He needs five minutes and a glass of water before you start again. This time he cries your name, is needier for your touch, and you find the angle that makes his knees tremble. You come just before he does. He touches your face. 

He showers before you, and you expect him to be gone by the time you’re back, but he’s sitting on the edge of your bed leafing through New Scientist magazine. There is another tattoo that you didn’t see before, and it’s a symbol on his back that you don’t recognise. His posture is awful, and you stifle your own laugh as you touch his shoulder. 

He falls asleep in the crook of your arm that night, and is gone by morning. 

  
  


You don’t remember going through the Shimmer: you don’t remember if it felt like pinpricks on your skin, or if the world was refracted through its prism for a brief moment. You wake up in a tent and don’t remember how you got there, or what day it is; when you emerge, you are somewhere in the thicket, and you can hear Bruce’s voice in the distant, pensive. You follow it to find a clearing where he’s trying to get your comms equipment working. Further ahead of him, Natasha and Clint are going through the food supplies. Your head is spinning. 

“Hey,” Bruce says, leaning back on his haunches to regard you. 

“What the hell is going on?” you ask. 

“That’s the big question,” he says. “I don’t remember yesterday, or the day before that, but according to the supplies, we’ve been out here for forty-eight hours. I don’t remember putting up camp, but here we are. I don’t even know how far we are from the Shimmer, or how close we are to the lighthouse. Our comms equipment is also all dead.”

“That’s not a surprise,” Carol says; you didn’t see her, but she walks up, her arms folded across her chest. You think she might be the only person on this mission with a true sense of purpose. “Comms equipment has died on every mission before us; they go through, and they go quiet.” 

“It’s weird, though,” Bruce says. “There are twenty satellites above us, but I can’t get a signal on anything. Nothing’s really  _ dead _ , per se, but none if it is connecting or working. We’re sitting in the middle of electromagnetic interference.” You don’t know why, but you can hear an odd peak of excitement in his voice. “There’s a lot of theories out there that electromagnetism affects human consciousness.” 

You look at him for a moment, and then turn to Carol. “If the comms equipment is out, then how do we know where we’re going?” 

“We need to keep heading due south,” she says. “Banner?”

He stands up as if he knows what she was about to say, and rolls up his sleeve, checking his watch. He looks at you for a minute, and a grin splits his face. “Hour hand at the sun,” he says, “and split the difference between the hour hand and twelve. South.” You help him up, and you can’t help yourself but smile at the glint of pride in his eye; he traces his finger across his watch face, and points to south. 

“Get Barton and Romanoff,” Carol says to you. “We’re going.” 

You catch Bruce for a moment as you pass him, and you say “I’m impressed”, and you mean it.

  
  


Bruce points the flowers out to you first, and he notes that they’re beautiful: they’re growing up the fence leading to the fisherman’s hut, a splash of colour against the dominant green. They’re a bouquet painted in pastel colours with the occasional burst of crimson or a wash of white, and they stop him in his tracks, even though no one else has stopped to care. Maybe in another life you, too, would be walking past them and to the fisherman’s hut. But the flowers have caught your eye. 

“That’s odd,” you say, and crouch. You can feel him listening. “They look like they’re different species. But…” You push apart the flowers, and their petals rain down on your hands. He crouches beside you, looks at the space you’ve cleared, and hums an affirmative. 

“They’re all growing from the same branch structure,” he says. “It’s like a pathology.” 

“It’s like it’s in continual mutation,” you say. “Like there’s an error in morphogenesis, but constantly. Over and over. It’s pretty, but in anything else, we’d be calling it a pathology before it could move.” You hum, and pluck one of the petals, giving it to Bruce. He turns it over in his hand, and lifts it to the light, then tucks it away in his front pocket. He gives you a look that you can’t quite read, and starts on the incline towards the hut. For a few moments, you push through and examine the plants further, but you don’t think you’d be able to find anything useful except at the genetic level; this is beyond the sort of thing you can study on the move. It runs deeper, and you wonder how deep. What causes this? 

You pick yourself up, and follow the sound of their voices. You can hear Natasha mention she’s found something, and when you approach, you see that she and Carol are looking at some fibreglass boats. Clint is scouting around the hut. Bruce is just standing, his head tilted to the sky, watching the haze of the Shimmer as it dances over you, breathing the clear air of the swamp. You get the feeling that he’s never been somewhere like this before: not past the Shimmer, because none of you have been in anywhere as charged as here, but this far outside of the city. You went to the rainforest once, on an expedition, stood underneath the bucketing storm and felt the rain trickle through the leaves to skim your skin; you saw animals you’re not sure have or ever will be categorised, sat in the company of butterflies, slept under a curtain of noise. You know that both of you aren’t going to survive this, and it makes you sad, because you wish that he could see the rainforest. You think that he would love it. 

You know you’re not supposed to feel for Bruce like this, but you recognise the look of pain in his eyes, and this level of desperation. People who are secure don’t come here. Both of you know that. 

Just as you consider saying something to him, a scream rises in the distance, and your hand seizes your gun. 

“Natasha!” Clint shouts, plunging himself into the dark water of the flooded hut: Carol swears at him, but you are right behind him, scrabbling for Natasha’s hands beneath the surface. You don’t know what’s taken her and you don’t care: you just grasp, filled with the gaping fear of knowing that if she dies it makes it all real. She’s military, and good, but still she’s screaming, thrashing against the force of what’s holding her - you pull her hand, but nothing; instead, she almost pulls you in, and it’s only Bruce hauling you back that keeps you from tipping over. 

You see a flash of albino white scales, and Clint is hauling Natasha out of the water. She splutters, spinning round as you hear a snapping of jaws. 

“Anyone want to tell me what the fuck that is?” Clint asks, lifting his rifle; all of you are watching the water now, waiting for the next movement, the next stirring. You can hear Bruce load a clip next to you, and in a whispered breath, Carol: “you’ve had that unloaded the whole time?”

Just as you take a breath and shift, the water erupts: out from where the hut floods into the swamp bursts the gator, all sharp jaws and slow lunge. Clint’s trigger finger is the fastest, unloading bullet after deafening bullet into its shocking white hide; but just in the moment that you relax, it propels itself towards you. Carol shoots it, once, twice, but still the gator is coming; you skip back and shoot, catching it right between its rows of fangs and bringing it to a dead halt right in front of your feet. Your entire clip is empty. That you aren’t dead or maimed is a serious fucking miracle, and you realise that your hands are shaking when you ask Clint if he could open the gator’s jaws for you. 

He side-eyes you for a moment, and then wrenches them apart so that you can take a look at the concentric rows of teeth. None of them are the same: the first sharp, the second almost curved in, the third flat. You wonder what would have happened to either you or Nat if those teeth had clamped down on your skin, and the thought and sensation of your own imminent mortality sends shivers down your spine. 

“It’s like the flowers,” you say. “Mutated. But…” 

“What the fuck is mutating at that level?” Bruce asks, resting his hands on his hips. One of his shirtsleeves falls from where he’s had it rolled up at his elbows. “I know I’m not a biologist, so pardon me, Steve, but I’m pretty sure I’m right in saying that these aren’t your garden variety mutations.” 

“What if it’s a crossbreed?” Carol asks, crouching down beside you to take a look as you take swabs. “Don’t sharks have teeth in rows like that?” 

“You can’t crossbreed between sharks and alligators,” you say. “They’re different species.” Clint is starting to strain above you, and you lean forward for a moment, gesturing in the gator’s mouth though a part of you feels as if it’s still ready to snap. “And shark teeth aren’t this different. They’re rows, but each row here looks like a completely different set of teeth.” You sit back, and let Clint drop the jaw back together. There’s something about this that’s worrying you, and you’re not sure if you can’t put your finger on it or if you just don’t want to. 

  
  


The trees in the distance are covered in multicoloured moss, and you find yourself incapable of tearing your eyes from the swatches of reds and rusts painted across the trunks as you pass by them in the boats; there’s something wrong with this at the biological level, but at the aesthetic, you feel as if you’ve walked into the best kind of surreal dream. You could well believe that you haven’t even left the base, that you’re still in your t-shirt in bed, but you can feel the pinpricks of sweat beading your skin and the weight of Bruce shifting in the boat behind you in a way that a dream could never replicate. You don’t need to pinch yourself: you’re just  _ aware _ , you can feel at a level beyond your own addled brain. You also would never dream something this beautiful. You haven’t dreamt anything like this before: you dream in greyscale realities when you’re not dreaming about loneliness. If your dreams warp anything, it’s time, not the beauty around you. 

And, if you’re really honest with yourself, in your dreams, people die. They don’t live. You wouldn’t see anything like the beauty of Bruce’s wide grin when you crack a joke at him, the vibrant red of Nat’s hair, the bump of Clint’s elbow against yours, Carol’s jacket wrapped round her waist and the halo of light around her when she leads you. 

“You know, I’ve gotta know,” Clint says from the boat parallel to yours, swiveling around a little; he has that look in his eye, that glint of mischief. “What is it that brings you all out here? Considering that we all just about got eaten by a gator, I want to know why you all came out here on this suicide mission.” 

“Why don’t you start, then?” Natasha asks, teasingly. You’re not really sure you want to know why anybody is here, but nonetheless you lean back on your haunches and relax on the paddling. The boats are scudding along now, anyway, propelled forward by your motion; but all of you deserve the break from the work, and you know you’re not the only person with the clawing anxiety that there might be something under the surface of the river, so any distraction will suffice. Even if it hurts. “Since you’re so desperate to know.” 

Clint sighs, but expectantly; you know that he’s known Nat a long time, and they have an easy chemistry. He smiles at her, then at you and Bruce. “I lost my family in an accident,” he says. “Been trying to pick my life up ever since. Didn’t really work.” You can hear a tone in his voice that you’ve never heard before, a sadness, as if he could break apart at any moment but keeps that beneath the surface. 

“I had a rough childhood,” says Natasha. “I’ve been doing my best to escape it, and try to help other girls. I didn’t come here to kill myself. I’m here to prove that I can do this and to prove to my girls that women can do whatever they set their minds to.” 

“Damn right,” says Carol from the front, and she turns to grin. “I fully intend to be the first leader to bring their team back. I want us to make it out of here. That’s why  _ I’m _ here. I think we can get through this and when we do, it’ll be good for all of us.” 

You can sense that this won’t be the final word: not when two untold stories are still hanging tantalisingly from reach, two whole tales of tragedy to open up and devour. You decide to go first, and you can’t see Bruce’s reaction, but you can feel one of his hands graze yours and you’re sure it’s no accident. 

“I’m here,” you say, “because my partner is military, and went missing a few years ago. I waited every day for news, hoping that one day they’d find him alive and well or that he’d arrive at my door and tell me that he was with me until the end of the line. That was what we used to say to each other. But I don’t know if I can say that he’ll come back anymore. So I wanted to get back to work, and he was always interested in field expeditions like this, and so I wanted to do this for him.” You realise that there are tears pricking your eyelids, and you glance up for a moment and blink them away. Thinking about him makes your chest ache from deep within; he’s an injury that will never heal, a  _ what if?  _ that haunts you every night that you can’t sleep. Your phone background is still of you and him and when you’re tired sometimes you still expect him to come through the door on a Saturday morning, fresh from the market. 

_ Bucky. _

“I’m here because of my husband,” says Bruce. You turn. Beneath his glasses, he is unravelling his pain in slow spools. “He was an atmospheric scientist - specifically, he was a fulminologist. He studied lightning. My family was never nice, and his was a bit of a mess, but they accepted me right away. He would tell me constantly how proud of me he was even though I always thought he was doing what was more interesting.” He takes a long breath that for a moment you think will never end. “He, uh. He died in the Shimmer. Or we think he did, because I might never know for sure. So I’m here to find out what took my husband.” 

You look at him for a brief moment and you wonder if the energy you’ve felt between you crackles from the same loss, the same uncertainty. Both of you feel vulnerable, and spread between your legs he mouthed his fear in ways that became connection. 

“Fuck,” says Clint, “we’ve seen a lot of death.” 

“I hope we make it out,” you say suddenly, and you’re surprised by the gentle murmur of assent around you. All of you have come here for death, but in the strangest way, you wonder if you’re really all seeking life. You all just want it to start again, shed free of the traumas that define you. 

You take a glance back at Bruce. “I didn’t know about your husband,” you say. He raises his eyebrows. 

“You know, I kinda figured that out,” he says, but not maliciously. You appreciate that. “It’s alright. I didn’t know about yours.” 

“I’m sorry.”

“You know, don’t be.” 

  
  


At the end of the river, you draw up to a collection of grey block huts; they all look identical, glum but overrun with the hyper colour splash of the local flora. Bright blue moss is covering one of the guard huts, and Carol pauses for a moment to look at them; you can’t blame her, or Clint, who’s picking his way through some of the tall grass. But she’s too efficient to pause and wonder about science - not when you haven’t even reached the lighthouse yet - and she shoulders up again, making for one of the larger buildings. 

“This used to be our headquarters,” she says. You wonder what age you were when the Shimmer enveloped this place, considering how far you’ve travelled since passing through it initially; a teenager, still? Had you even kissed Bucky for the first time then, or were you still poring over college applications? Was Bruce still on his first doctorate, or doing a Masters? “It should still be safe to stay in.” 

“Oh, cute,” says Clint as he ducks through the doorway. “Reminds me of the hostels I used to have to stay in.” 

The barracks are dismal, soullessly devoid of any personality or colour save the occasional sprouting plant through the floor; the mess hall is lined with mattresses and tables, and you walk astride them as you delve deeper inside. There are windows, but they only let in muddy light, blocked by the dirt and overgrowth. The place is all too military, you think, but you pause for a moment as an aberration clocks in your field of vision. It’s a backpack cached between two of the mattresses, and you gesture for Carol, who is with you in a matter of seconds. 

“It’s khaki,” she says. “Military. Probably one of the missions before us.” She whistles through her fingers, so sharply that it almost startles you and definitely startles Bruce, who you can see jump out of your peripheral vision. You stifle a laugh as he arrives at your side, a breath later than Natasha. 

“Someone left in a hurry,” she says. Clint unzips the backpack and tips it over, unloading normal supply after normal supply - a poncho, some biscuits, a toiletry bag with a razor inside - until finally a video camera comes clattering out to the floor. It’s not that old, you can tell, and has a screen that flips out at the side. The battery is dead, but you have more in your own pack, and spend a few moments reloading the camera and listening to the digital beeps of its rebirth. 

“Are you sure there’ll be anything useful on there?” Bruce asks, peering over your shoulder. 

“It’s worth a try,” says Carol. “Any information is good information out here.” 

You load the most recent video file; for a few moments, there’s nothing clear, just the blur of motion and voices that you can’t make out, then the movement of the camera slows and it whirrs into focus. There’s a man in the centre of the screen, haggard, with long blond hair tied up but most of it escaping to cascade down the sides of his face. You swear that you can feel the muscles in Bruce’s arms tense where they’re pressed against you; there’s something off-kilter about the scene, about the look in the man’s eyes. When he speaks, his voice is loud, authoritative; but there’s a slight tremble to it, too. He looks as if he hasn’t slept in days, or perhaps years. 

“I don’t know how long we’ve been here,” he says. “I can’t tell anymore, because I suddenly realise that days have passed that I don’t remember at all. The longer I stay here, the harder it becomes to remember my home. I miss my family. My husband. I wish I could see him one more time. There are so many things that I wish I could say.” 

The clip cuts out, there. You press on to the next video. 

They’re in a pool somewhere in the barracks; you can hear the sound of water dripping somewhere in the background, and though the video image is stuttering a little, you recognise the man from the first video. He’s talking sharply to a man with dark skin wearing a serious expression, and then the camera pans over to another man, this one cuffed to one of the pipes pressed up against the bathroom wall. 

“What the fuck,” Clint says. 

“We need to do this,” the serious man is saying. “We need to see.” 

“Don’t fucking do it!” the man cuffed to the pipe is screaming, over and over. “Don’t! Fucking don’t! You don’t have to see shit! Jesus Christ!” His voice is cutting right through your chest, the fear palpable even in the room now, beyond whenever this transgressed; your breath holds as the dark-haired man lifts up the shirt of the trapped one, and the blond pulls a knife. “Fuck!  _ Fuck _ !” 

“I’m sorry!” the blond shouts, and, with surprising precision considering his subject is squirming, incises a hole in his stomach. You have to look away, right until you hear Natasha gasp; you’ve never heard her gasp, and save the alligator incident, you’ve never seen her lose her cool before. You turn back hesitantly, and just in time to see the intestines of the trapped man moving like snakes in the blond’s hands. 

“Nat,” you say, and push the camera into her hands. 

You have to walk away from it, then, because you don’t think you can watch anymore: the reality of the situation, of where you are, of the fact that everyone who has come here before is hitting you like a hammer to the chest. Your lungs feel tight, and your heart is skipping double, and you have to step outside, gasping in air, counting breaths in and out. 

When you go back inside, Clint is gone and Bruce is working through the rest of the backpack’s contents. Natasha is still looking at the camera, but all you can hear is the blond man’s distinctive timbre singing a song you don’t recognise, and you think that last clip might’ve been the most important thing on there. 

“Carol,” Clint’s voice calls. “You gotta see this.” 

You follow her through the mess hall and into that pool that you recognise from the video, dingy with disuse and black stains creeping across the walls. The tiles are greying, too, but as you step inside, you realise what Clint was talking about: the body of the man from the video is  _ possessing  _ the entire back wall, a sprawl of growths that remind you of blood vessels, or alveoli. A whole circulatory system of mutation is emerging from different parts of his body, each captured still in a different place: his torso erected separate and higher from his legs, the bottom of his skeletal jaw raised out of your reach. It’s both beautiful in the wash of green and white colours and absolutely haunting: you’ve studied biology for years and still you have absolutely no idea what could’ve caused this. It’s almost angelic. 

Behind you, Bruce throws up. Natasha offers him some water.

“We’re not staying here,” he says to Carol. 

“It’s too late to set up camp,” she says carefully, but he shakes his head, his voice raising and distress rising. 

“I can’t stay in here, Carol. Please.” 

She nods, and touches his shoulder, guiding him away from the wall. You know he’s just thrown up, but still he looks queasy, as if he could drop at any moment. “Alright. We can stay in another one of the buildings tonight. You and Clint go and search for somewhere safe; Steve, Natasha, we need to finish looking for anything useful. See if we can find anything about what happened to the guys before us.”

The mess hall has been left quickly, with most of the tables and chairs overturned or pushed aside, leaving a grey apocalyptic scene; it reminds you of photographs you’ve seen of cities abandoned to nuclear radiation, the eeriness of things just left the way they were. You find, in a corner of the room, two boards: one demonstrating what seems to be a rota, though with some of the names crossed out, and one with a map of the barracks. You look at the names that have been crossed out on the rota, and know without a doubt that it means death.  _ P. Quill _ .  _ S. Lang. P. Coulson. _

The rest of them, too, you know must be dead now.

You wonder if one day another team will come, and your name will be on a rota. 

  
  


The base is set up in an old rec room: there’s a pool table, a dart board, a pinball machine. Almost all of them are host to the Shimmer’s distinctive mould, and though you like the phantasmagoria of colours, once you set up your sleeping bag and drop your things, you have absolutely no desire to remain there until nightfall comes, so instead you tuck a knife into your belt and walk. You pass by the buildings of the old headquarters, listening to the sounds of the forest, birds singing in the surrounding trees. This must’ve been a peaceful place to have a headquarters and a peaceful place to live: according to Clint’s map, there’s a village somewhere nearby that was evacuated years ago. 

In the distance, you can hear the sound of singing, and you follow it through to the mess hall. 

It’s Bruce. He can’t sing, not really, but he’s singing the same song as the man on the camera, and tracing one of the names on the old guard rota; it’s not crossed out, but it might as well be for all you know of what’s happened to him. 

He goes silent when he hears the sound of your footsteps, embarrassment tingeing his aura. 

“He was your husband?” you ask, and Bruce nods; his fingers are still touching the name  _ T. Odinson _ . He always looks sad, but this time his pain is so palpable that you can almost feel it yourself; he’s here, now, pulling up the floorboards of his husband’s last days. The footage of Odinson admitting that he missed his husband had made your stomach drop; and you feel a pit in it, too, for sleeping with Bruce. You know that for the both of you it’s been years, but as the pain turns back from an ebb into a roar, you can’t help but wonder if it was the right thing to do. “I’m sorry.” 

“Thor,” he says, sounding choked. “Love of my life. And this is what happened to him.” 

“The love of your life, huh?” you say, squeezing his shoulder. You can’t imagine Bruce Banner calling  _ anyone  _ the love of his life, and yet he just has, voice as soft as touch. “You said he was an atmospheric scientist?” 

Bruce turns away from the board and nods, taking a seat on the destitute floor; you know that it’s definitely dirty, but you join him. “Yeah,” he says. “One of my tattoos is for him.” He lifts his shirt, shows you the formula again. “It’s the basic theory of a Schumann resonance. They’re low level electromagnetic frequencies generated by lightning strikes, and they help to measure things like weather, global temperature variations, and transient luminous events. Thor was really interested in them, and it kinda felt more meaningful than just getting his name on me or something.” Bruce laughs as if to defer his energy, and then quietens for a moment, reaching into the front pocket of his jacket and taking out a photo that he passes to you. 

It’s of him, and Thor with slightly shorter hair, on their wedding day. 

“God, how  _ young  _ were you guys?” you ask. They look like teenagers; Bruce is practically glowing. 

“Oh, yeah,” Bruce says. “We got married really young. I was nineteen, and we did it right after our college exams. There’s this picture of us cutting the cake and you can see all these ink stains on my hands. And we couldn’t afford to buy a cake, so it was this one tier chocolate monstrosity Thor made the night before, and to make up for the fact it was uneven, he just covered the whole thing in icing.” He’s smiling now, intently, rocking a little back and forth as he remembers. “The wedding all really small: Thor’s family hosted the reception afterwards, and we all just wore the nicest thing in our closet. We ran out of alcohol, twice, and everyone had eaten the cake in twenty minutes, but it was fun.” 

“That sounds sweet,” you say. Part of you has always wished you’d married Bucky, but you know he’d have had none of it. He’d have had to have left the military before he’d even consider. “What was that song he was singing in the video? Did you have your first dance to it?” 

“Our first dance was to that timeless classic,  _ Wichita Lineman _ ,” Bruce grins. “No, when we moved into our first apartment, we used to listen to this PJ Harvey record when we were decorating, and we listened to it so much that we learned all the words. They were our songs, I guess. Every time I hear them I think of him.” 

A few beats pass between you. 

“I miss him,” he says, and rests his head on your shoulder.  

  
  


Bucky is in your dream. 

You wake suddenly, a sheen of sweat glistening on your forehead, and you wipe at it, careful not to disturb Bruce, who has only just rolled over. You sit up slowly, and as you survey the room, realise that Natasha’s eyes are open and looking steadily back at you. You jerk your chin:  _ you alright?  _

She nods, and then gestures to Bruce. You had been worried that he wouldn’t be able to sleep, but he had been receptive to taking sedatives; before he had fallen asleep, he’d told you that he was glad you were here, and you’ve been thinking about it ever since. You just smile at her. She rolls her eyes.

You know that Clint Barton could sleep through a hurricane, but you point to him anyway, and Natasha laughs softly. 

You jut your thumb at the door, indicating that you’re going to go and see Carol, and Natasha nods. Your shift on the rota isn’t until later, but you don’t feel as if you could sleep anymore, not with the image of Bucky still fresh in your mind, in his white shirt, beautiful; and so you cross the grass of the yard and find Carol, perched in a makeshift watch station, a map of the area in her hands. She glances up at you.

“Hi, Steve,” she says. “You’re not meant to be here until three. Is everything okay?” 

“Yeah,” you say, rubbing your eyes. “I just can’t sleep.” 

“I get that,” she says, and then lifts the map, her finger dancing across its surface as she talks. “Here’s the plan: south west from us, just over here, is a village evacuated a decade ago, Ville Perdu. If we make there for tomorrow, then we can continue onto the coast, and then, the lighthouse. We’ll need to keep up the pace, but I think we can do it.”

You nod. “Sounds good.” 

A silence hangs heavy in the air for a moment. She looks at you. 

“What’s going on with you and Banner?” she asks. 

That’s a loaded question, you think. Even  _ you _ don’t know what’s going on between you and Banner, not really; you know that you cherish him, but you couldn’t say why. Maybe it’s because you get the sense that he needs you, or someone; or maybe there isn’t any reason at all, and the two of you just sort of  _ are _ , two stars in the same orbit. Bruce explained magnetism to you once, on a day that you don’t remember: the push and pull of magnetic objects, magnetic fields and the attraction of the poles. 

“Electric currents make magnetic fields,” he’d said to you as you’d idly pushed two of the magnets he keeps in his pocket together, feeling the pressure of the repulsion in your fingers before spinning one around and watching them snap together. 

You wonder if magnetism could explain the two of you, but you don’t really know anything about physics; Bruce, maybe, could explain this, eyes twinkling through the lens of his glasses, but you never could. 

“We slept together,” you say eventually. “Back on base.”

Entropy. Order. Disorder. Where do you toe the line? 

Is the chaos around you, or is it inside you? God knows. Is the chaos the Shimmer, or is it your incessant desire to wrap an arm around Bruce Banner and tell him that it’s alright? 

“Are you guys serious?” Carol asks. What she means is  _ will this get in the way of our mission? _ , but you can sense a personal curiosity, too. 

“I don’t know,” you admit. She cracks a laugh, and leans against one of the walls of the watch station, which creaks against her weight. “I don’t really know how ‘dating’ works in a classified zone. If we get out, we’ll work it out.” 

“ _ When _ we get out,” says Carol. You don’t want to tell her that even if, by some miracle you  _ do _ get out of here, you have the distinct feeling that you won’t survive; and so you just nod, as if you believe that one day you’ll see the other side of the Shimmer again, the world where time ticks along in measures you can understand and where your memories don’t feel a little like they’re hovering five feet above you. Even your feelings don’t quite seem as if they’re attached to your body anymore. 

You wonder if that’s why, every time you look at Bruce, you feel your heart swim. Because this is all you have now, and forever. 

You start as a noise cuts through the silence: metallic, shredding, tearing; you realise suddenly that you don’t have your gun, and you feel naked and terrified. You step slightly behind Carol, your breath coming in short stabs that you force yourself to temper. 

“What was that?” you ask her; Carol’s eye is squinting through the night vision scope on her rifle, and she’s looking, scanning. She makes a noise of uncertainty for a moment, and then cuts off. When she speaks again, she has regained all authority, and you realise that you trust her immediately with your life. 

“There’s a tear in the perimeter fence,” she says. 

“Something’s come through the fence?” you ask, and frown. The fence is metal, strong, your only sense of security in this camp. For something to tear through it, it has to be stronger than the alligator from before, and that thought sends shivers up your spine; every hair on the back of your neck stands on end, and you touch your hand to it. It’s an omen. You’ve never believed in them, but suddenly you’re sure of it. 

From the grass emerges Natasha, holding her rifle. “What’s happening?” she asks. You’d like to know that, too. 

“Something just ripped open the fence,” Carol says, and for a moment you swear you can hear the faintest hint of a wobble in her tone; but perhaps it’s the fear playing tricks on you. Carol is staunch. “Stay on guard. We don’t know what’s coming, but we have to be prepared.” 

Natasha nods, and at that moment you hear a noise that doesn’t belong to any of you: it’s the thump of movement, somewhere close. You freeze. 

All you can hear for a moment is the sound of your taut breaths. 

Natasha lifts the flashlight from her belt, and clicks it on.

Less than two metres away from you is what you think you might call a black bear, but it’s  _ more _ : it’s huge and hulking, and further still, the illumination of Natasha’s flashlight picks out its mutations. It’s beautiful in ways that are also terrible: the bear seems to have been fused with plant matter, dark green leaves joining the pelt of its fur and thorns and branches coiling round its head and legs, jagged armour. It regards you. 

You saw a Japanese film once with Bucky at the Alamo Drafthouse: it was a film about Gods and demons and forest spirits, and you had wondered then about the forests of Japan, if they were so different as to have produced this folklore; or if the people there instead truly listened and respected. 

You understand in the moment that the bear stands over you the respect the characters had for their Gods even in moments of crisis. Death looms and yet you would bow at its feet. 

Natasha and the bear are gone before you have time to register the rush of movement; her name slips from your mouth in desperation. The area around you is dark, her flashlight off now, and it is as if she just  _ vanished _ ; your heart is pounding as reality catches up to it, and from Carol’s hand you unthinkingly snatch her scope and look through it. 

First, nothing. And then a glimpse of a black form rushing through the dark, dragging behind it Natasha; you see a glimpse of her red hair, and then she’s gone, and you feel the nausea hit. 

Clint breaks through the shadows and catches your arm, his eyes wide. “What the hell is going on?” he asks, his voice low; you can’t find your own and your response comes out in short stabs. 

“Natasha, she was- right here, and then the bear- the fucking  _ bear _ , it took her, Clint, she was just  _ gone _ -” 

A scream pierces through the night, and Clint takes off after it; you follow, Carol at your side. You can’t tell where the sound is coming from, but Clint’s senses are razor-sharp; you hear the sound of him clashing against metal as he reaches the perimeter fence just before you, and it gives you the chance to realise that she’s gone. The forest outside is limitless and expansive, a sea of darkness from which Natasha’s dying screams are echoing, the noise trapping itself into your skull. 

The screaming stops, but you can still hear a faint echo in your own mind. 

You lean against the perimeter fence. 

  
  


You are awake when day breaks. 

Bruce’s sedatives have worn off by the time he comes round; he shakes when you recall the night before, in a way that you didn’t know was possible. You touch his shoulder and squeeze, but still he trembles with fear, and you swear you hear him mumbling  _ Thor _ when you fetch him his medications. You check his heart rate. It’s unhealthily fast. 

“Why are you all looking at me like I’m crazy?” he asks. “This is insane. We need to go back.”

“No,” says Carol. He looks at her. 

“What do you mean,  _ no _ ? You just came back and told me that Natasha had been eaten by a bear. We have enough data; Rogers has been gathering samples and they’re more than enough to start with. We are going to die in here. If we turn back now, we might make it out alive and get our data back to the Southern Reach. If we keep going, all that stuff we’ve found - it’ll be for nothing. Nat’s death will have been for nothing.” 

“We don’t know that she’s dead,” Clint interjects. 

“Our mission is to get to that lighthouse. That’s the source of the phenomena; nothing we have is explainable. I didn’t come here just to turn back at the first sign of danger. We all knew that there was a chance we might not make it out,” Carol says, and you get the sense that what she’s saying is, for her, final. Bruce rubs his temples. There is an aura emanating from him in waves so strongly that you begin to feel the urge to anxiously fidget. 

“Steve,” he says. 

“I think we should go back,” you say slowly, “but not the way we came.” 

Clint stops playing with the safety on his gun, and looks up at you: his gaze is steely, strong. “You think we should go deeper,” he says. “Because once we hit the shoreline, we hit the perimeter wall, and if we follow that then we won’t have to wade through four days of fucking swamp again.” 

“That’s the idea.” 

“And it’s just a nice coincidence that the lighthouse is on the shore.” 

“Look, I don’t want to go into that lighthouse. I don’t want to know what’s in there. All of the stuff out here - the mutations, the animals - they’re scaring the shit out of me, Clint. I don’t want to know what could change biology like that. But Banner’s husband disappeared in here, and we’re not any closer to finding out what happened to him - whether he’s alive and still here, somewhere, or if he’s dead. I think he deserves answers.”

You know that you just struck low. 

But you also know that you’re right. 

You hold your hand out to Bruce, and he takes it, lifting himself up off the floor. 

  
  


You find Natasha’s body at the end of a trail of crushed undergrowth; it breaks out into a clearing where the foliage ends for a moment, and just where the growth resumes, you find what’s left of her. The reality hits you when you see the panes of glass over her irises; there’s no light left in her eyes, and she’s covered in blood, and if you had any weaker a disposition you think you might have thrown up. You close her eyes. 

You take a moment to sit in the clearing. Your chest feels heavy. 

There’s a rustling in the trees, and you sit up, reaching for your gun; but what breaks out from the foliage is a deer, calm and beautiful. It stops in the centre of the clearing and grazes for a moment. From its antlers grow flowers that twist and twirl round the structures, cherry blossoms; and just beyond it is what seems to be its mirror image, but this deer is more mutated, its short white fur blended with green stems. Its face seems incomplete, mostly skull, but it moves in perfect sync with the other: two halves of a whole, you think. 

You are sure that you should be scared, but something about it is ethereally tranquil, and you find yourself completely in awe of it. 

  
  


The sun is setting by the time you reach the village; it’s a little town full of small houses, and has been mostly reclaimed by the plants. Buildings are swallowed up in the multicoloured moss, leaving mosaics across the old woodwork, and through cracks in windows and doors leaves emerge, fluttering in the wind. Carol is issuing instructions, but you barely hear them, struck by the abyss of silence enveloping the town. 

People have been visiting abandoned towns and cities for years, and you have never understood it, but all of a sudden, you do. It makes you uneasy and yet you never want to leave. You just want to stand here, and wait. 

You’re broken from your reverie by the sound of Bruce’s voice; he’s further up ahead, and calling, gesturing for you to come over. As you walk, you see why: silhouettes of people, and for a moment you wonder how you didn’t notice them until you realise that they are still, misshapen. 

They aren’t people. They’re  _ plants _ . 

Roots and branches, leaves and flowers: they wind and twist and turn together in the shape of people. You can make out among them children with knotted root knees, adult figures with flowers forming their torsos. It’s a gallery of topiary art, foliage replacing flesh. 

As you walk between the living statues, you notice that they aren’t all completely humanoid: some are incomplete, legs without chest or vice versa, and some arms are bursting out into the sturdy branches of trees, veins breaking out to grow leaves. 

“I’m going to guess that this wasn’t just the villagers being really good at gardening,” Clint says dryly. You nod. 

“They haven’t been made,” you say. “They grew this way.” 

“ _ Grew _ ? You’re saying that these plants just grew perfectly into people shapes?” 

Bruce starts quietly; it takes a moment for you to register him, seated between the figures. His quiet is contemplation, not shyness. “Rogers is right,” he says. “And this whole thing is starting to make sense now. See, I thought that the reason our comms equipment wasn’t working was that the radio waves were being blocked by the Shimmer. But that couldn’t be right, because nothing else is blocked: the sun is still shining here, and I can see the sky. It means that the light waves aren’t being blocked. They’re being refracted. And so our radios - they’re not being  _ blocked _ , the signal is just split.” He turns to you. You’re starting to understand what he’s saying. “Steve, what would I get if I sequenced one of these?” 

“Hox. Pax 6. The genes that make up animal body structure,” you say, because you know where he’s going.

He has to be wrong. 

But at the same time, you know he’s right. 

“Right. The plants are growing in animal body structures. Arms, shoulders, legs, hips; they’ve grown in human forms. Which means that the Shimmer has to be a prism. It’s refracting everything: light waves, radio waves, fields, and even DNA. This shouldn’t be possible, but it’s happening right in front of us.”

“You said it refracts DNA,” you say, wondering why you’re asking a question that you already know the answer to. Maybe it’ll become more real if Bruce says it. “Does that mean it refracts all DNA?”

Bruce hesitates, then nods. Clint takes a step forward. 

“What do you mean,  _ all DNA _ ?” he asks. 

“That includes our DNA,” you say. “What’s happening to everything else is also going to happen to us.” 

  
  


Carol picks one of the least overgrown houses for you to barricade yourselves inside; you spend the evening boarding the windows and blocking the doors, and though your limbs feel heavy and tired from the work, your mind is still buzzing. You take first watch. 

When everyone is asleep, you slip into the next room and unscrew the top of your flashlight, turning its exposed bulb into a lamp. You take a sip of water from your bag, and then withdraw from one of its endless pockets your microscope and a scalpel, which you click a blade into with slightly shaking hands. You roll your sleeve up and cuff it. 

You’d thought that Bruce may have pressed on your arm too hard, and that’s what had caused it, the bruise blossoming near your elbow. But it’s been getting bigger, and darker, expanding slowly; and instead of fading through spectrums of green and yellow, it’s still purple, as if the bruise is still fresh. It looks wet, too, textured with the first burgeoning of a pattern, and you take a deep breath as you cut into it. 

You trap your blood in a slide. When you peer through the lens of the microscope at the wash of red, you realise that it is lit up with an otherworldly shimmer; and then, as you watch, it splits. 

A memory flushes its way to the surface of your mind: something that you’d thought you’d forgotten, but is now suddenly as sharp again as if it had happened the day before. One of your biology lectures; Bucky had snuck in and was sitting beside you, doodling something on the desk as you had diligently taken notes. 

“You’re such a nerd,” he had said affectionately to you as you flipped your notepad over, each page filled with the familiar scrawl of your handwriting. 

“Cancer is, essentially, a genetic mutation that leads to unregulated cell growth,” your professor had said. You remember clearly the movement of your hand as it mirrored the words: the curl of your  _ g _ , the joint between the  _ m _ and the  _ u _ . “But it’s interesting that way. Genetic mutation is the reason for human existence and the creation of species, but it can also make us ill, kill or cripple us. Life is given and life is taken away.” 

“Maybe that’s what’s so scary about cancer,” Bucky muses from next to you. “It isn’t some external force trying to kill you. It’s just your own body changing in a way that you can’t really do anything about, and that you can’t control.” 

“Philosophy one-oh-one is next door,” you had said idly, grinning at him. 

He had been right. 

You clear your microscope away, walk through to the bathroom, and throw up. 

Bruce is sitting at the kitchen table when you walk through, and he looks up at you. He’s twirling one of your spare slides in his hand, and offers you a sip from his flask; you take it, sipping carefully to avoid disturbing your body further. There’s a strange energy to him, you notice as you hand him back his flask: something that seems both taut and frenetic. 

He kisses you. 

Holy shit, you think, that is dedication, or desperation, or something in between. 

He knots his grip on your shirt at the small of your back, and he touches his forehead to yours, then kisses you again - God, his mouth is soft - and buries his face in the crook of your neck. He says something that gets lost in your skin. 

It takes you a little while to realise that he falls asleep like that, tucked into your warmth, but when you hear the gentle rasp of his snore, you can’t help but smile. You ease him gently back onto the kitchen chair, and wrap him in your coat. 

You move your own sleeping bag into the kitchen. 

  
  


In your dream, you can see the curvature of Bucky’s back, the tumble of his hair onto his shoulders. He turns to you, and grins as if everything in the world is alright again. 

  
  


You aren’t sure what wakes you up: the light or the noise, but when you open your eyes, Clint has his gun pointed at Bruce and is brandishing Bruce’s wedding photograph. You swear under your breath. 

“That was your fucking husband gutting people, huh?” Clint demands. He swings round when he notices that you’re awake, and for a split second you make eye contact with the dark of the barrel before you look up at him. His eyes seem to wobble. “You’re in on this, aren’t you? I don’t know what the fuck you two are up to. Three, actually. I can’t be sure  _ he _ tells the truth, since he just  _ neglected _ to tell us that maniac was his husband, but  _ you _ ? All I have is your word that Natasha is dead. And I never saw what happened. What the fuck is wrong with all of you?”

“Clint,” you start. He shakes his head. 

“Don’t,” he says. “Don’t start.” Tears are forming in his eyes. “What the fuck did you do to Nat?” 

You suppose that if Bruce’s theory of refraction is correct - which you’re sure it is - then it wouldn’t be out of the realms of impossibility that some sort of psychological effect could occur. Psychological refraction. The thought doesn’t feel reassuring with a gun pointed at you. You take a shuddering breath, and quickly cast a glance over at Bruce; you can see that his hands, knotted together at the back of the chair, are shaking. A sudden urge to hit Clint rises up in your chest. 

That’s when you hear Natasha’s voice; it’s in the distance, too far to make out words, but it’s definitely her. Clint spins round. 

“Nat!” 

Bruce looks at you, eyes wide. You shake your head. “She was dead,” you say. He nods, and swallows; you see a layer of fear add to the mosaic of absolute terror he seems to live with. Clint is heading for the front door and marches past Carol; you brief her quickly as you undo the ties binding Bruce’s hands. His wrists are rubbed red when you release them. 

When Natasha’s voice comes again, the three of you go still. “ _ Help me! Help! _ ” 

“No,” says Bruce, slamming himself back against the kitchentop. “What the  _ hell _ -” 

Something slams against the door, heavier than a person. 

Both you and Carol have your guns in an instant, and she bellows at Clint as he fumbles with your barricaded door - God knows what’s behind it, because you saw Natasha and she was  _ dead _ , but just before any of you can do anything, he wrenches the door open and the moonlight streams in; along with it, the bear. 

When Bruce hits the light switch, you can see it in its unholy glory: the thorns crowning its head, its half exposed jaws, the hooks of its long claws. The light of the bulbs shines in its eyes as it pushes inside, so tall that it’s at head height with Clint’s hips. He stares at it in disbelief. 

And with one lazy swipe of its paw, he’s on the floor; you barely even see the slick of red, but you hear enough to make the nausea come crawling back up your gut. 

The bear turns and opens its mouth, as if to howl. The empty eye socket of its right side seems to watch you as its teeth glow, but just when you expect an animal noise to emit from the bear’s depths, instead you hear Natasha screaming. “ _ Fuck! Fuck! Help me, please! _ ” 

You go cold. 

Bruce shakes his head and just before his hands clasp over his mouth, he lets out a cry of “oh,  _ fuck no _ ”. 

The bear takes the moment to ram, crashing into the kitchen table and jamming it against Bruce’s chest; you can hear the air being expelled from his lungs on impact, and you take a leap aside as the bear swings for you, fumbling to try and aim your gun. You can’t seem to figure out what to do with it now, and the bear is coming again: but just as you think you’re going to have to make another dash for freedom, you hear a gunshot that rings your ears with shrieking tinnitus, then another, and another, until Carol’s clip is empty and the bear topples in the centre of the room. 

“Clint,” you say. 

“Dead,” says Carol.

Your heart is hammering so hard it hurts. 

  
  


A piece of wood broke off from the table and impaled Bruce’s chest; not deeply, but enough that you need to dig further than your first aid kit. He’s out of it the whole time you extract the splinter and bandage up the remaining gash. You’re not sure how, or why, just that he seems to return to himself about half an hour later, when he sits up and asks you for water. You hold the bottle when he drinks, just in case. 

“Where’s Carol?” he asks. 

“She left for the lighthouse. I said I’d stick with you until you were ready to go.”

“Thank you for staying,” he says. “Not just now, but - the whole time.” He shifts, lifting himself to his feet, and then stumbles, touching his chest, his fingers brushing where his shirt sits over his bandaging. “We gotta go. I need to get to that lighthouse.” It’s clear to you, and probably to him, too, that he isn’t in any state to start heading off; but you know he’ll go no matter what you say, and you nod. You help him with his bag, which is almost too heavy for him, and lend him your shoulder for the first hour of the trek; you stop for a break, then, and you let him eat some of your rations.

“Steve,” he says. “You don’t have to do this.” 

“I’m getting you to that lighthouse.” 

He smiles at you, so earnestly that it surprises you, and nods. 

It takes you about another hour to get to the coast; it’s sudden, the way that the thicket gives way to the sand. The space clears out. In the distance, you can finally see the lighthouse. It stands proud and tall over the beach, its quiet majesty almost matching that of the Shimmer. 

Without thinking, you start to walk towards it. 

  
  


_ Your memories slide together.  _

_ “What university did you go to?” you asked Bruce. He laughed.  _

_ “Which time?” _

_ “The first time, smartass,” you grinned. You don’t remember where you were, the Southern Reach or within the Shimmer, and so in your memory the two of you were sitting in your bedroom in the Southern Reach, but was overgrown with leaves of every colour, on your walls and emerging from your sheets. A huge tree stood proud next to your bed. The floor was carpeted with moss. _

_ “MIT,” he said. “Of all of the universities, it’s still my favourite, but not because of the accommodation, that’s for sure. Where did you go?”  _

_ “NYU,” you said. “I got rejected from Columbia.”  _

_ “Fucking Columbia,” he laughed; a real belly laugh that you hadn’t been expecting, and you didn’t know what was so funny - God, he’d probably been there - but his laughter had set you off, too, until you were crashing against each other. “They really missed out on you.”  _

_ He had kissed you, then.  _

_ “Do you regret it?” you asked.  _

_ “What?” _

_ You had started smiling before you even managed to get the words out. “Not getting an eighth PhD.”  _

_ He hummed. “If we make it out of here,” he’d said, “I’m doing the eighth. And I’m doing it at Edinburgh.”  _

_ Your memories are still sliding, moving together like tectonic plates; your mind conjures images of Bruce beneath you on the bed, and then he warps, becomes Bucky and suddenly you’re in your bedroom in Brooklyn having sex for the first time and he’s laughing because you’ve gotten stuck in your shirt, and you miss him so much that you think your chest is going to crack open like the violent formation of a new continent.  _

_ In the sky, the Shimmer gleams.  _

  
  


There is no tongue in his mouth: instead, it looks like a snake, bulbous and red and writhing. From contusions in his arms emerge what seem to be fingers, and as he bleeds to death on the sand, the snake and the fingers still from their death rattles. Thor had shot him, but he had already been dying from the laceration in his neck showing the other end of the snake; the video footage starts after that occurrence, and opens with the man dying on the floor. 

“This man,” Thor says, crouching by his body. “Was James Rhodes, and he was a good man, and if you find this, please tell his family he was thinking of them always. The things he has done here - I don’t understand what’s happening, what  _ forces  _ are working on us, but this wasn’t him. Rhodey looked out for everybody. But, like we all will, he changed.”

“Fuck, man,” a voice says in the distance. “Fuck.” 

The camera in your hands makes a whirring noise as it cuts you to the next video. Thor, recognisable even from behind by his tied-up blond hair, is standing waiting at the coastline; beside him is another man whose name you don’t know and Bruce doesn’t either. He’s walking back and forth along the sand, the rhythm of his steps digging a small pit. He stops, suddenly, and turns to the sea. The water seems to be shaking, and you frown. 

“He’s coming,” the man says. “Ooh, boy, he’s coming!” 

Before you can wonder aloud  _ what _ is coming, the water rises and crests, and from the break in the surface emerges a dolphin: but not like one you’ve ever seen before. It’s massive, so incredibly proportioned that it must be bordering on the size of a blue whale, and its admirers on the coastline whoop as it soars for a moment through the air before breaking back through the water, the force of its impact sending a wave up the beach that knocks the camera from its stand. 

The camera whirs again, and switches into the distinctive green and black of night vision. The man you don’t know is lying on the sand, firing his gun at the sky; from the distance, Thor approaches, breaking into a sprint. 

“Scott!” he calls. “What are you doing?”

“I’m shooting at it,” Scott replies, as if this makes perfect sense. Thor sighs, taking a seat next to him; his expression is unreadable from the shadows of night vision, but there’s an immense heaviness to the sound of his voice when it comes. 

“Shooting at what?” 

“ _ It _ . Whatever stupid scientific force is causing all of this. I’m shooting at it, because it must be everywhere, otherwise we’d all still be alive and wouldn’t have extra hands growing.” He groans, and puts down his rifle. “Nobody deserved this. Not even Quill. It’s not fair. Does this thing even know who it’s killing? Or  _ that  _ it’s killing?” 

“You said it was a force, so it probably isn’t sentient,” Thor says gently. 

“I wish it was,” says Scott. “So it could feel guilty.” 

The camera clicks; the next video is only seconds long, and in the distance, Scott is seizing on the ground in ways that don’t seem possible. When he turns, you think that you can see something growing out of his skull; but then Thor arrives, says something to him, and shoots him. 

Another click, and the backdrop changes: the interior of the lighthouse, where you found the camera in front of a charred husk. Thor is sitting in the centre of the shot, cross-legged. His hair is finally free, falling in waves down his shoulders. He coughs. 

“I thought I was a man,” he says. “That I had a life. That my name was Thor. Now I’m not so sure. If I wasn’t Thor, then - who am I?” He looks up and at the cameraman; you wonder who it could’ve been, and where they are now. To have survived so long seems to have been an incredible feat. “Was I you? Were you me?” He looks back at the camera, right down the barrel, and shakes his head. “I can’t bear it anymore. Find my - your - our husband and tell him I love him. That you love him, I suppose.” He smiles for a moment just at that mention of Bruce, and takes from his lap what you recognise to be a phosphorus grenade. 

The shadow of his death still stands on the interior wall, you realise. It was still there when you took the camera.

On the footage, in front of your eyes, the tortured Thor Odinson fizzles out like a star. 

The cameraman steps into frame for a moment and you swear you recognise him; he seems to be utterly familiar, and it’s as he turns and looks at the camera you realise that the cameraman is the spit of Thor - no, he  _ is  _ Thor.

You shut the camera and throw it into the sand on instinct. 

Bruce is at the entrance to the tunnel in the lighthouse, an odd quirk of nature growing in an oddly preserved building. Though dusty, the lighthouse isn’t overgrown like the village; the only reminder of its alienness is the tunnel, a matrix of strange colours and textures. Bruce is taking samples there, and you quietly resolve that you won’t tell him what you just saw; God knows the last footage was enough for him. 

You take your notebook from your bag, and a pen, and write down the names  _ James Rhodes  _ and  _ Scott _ . 

The soft blue-green light of the tunnel is lighting up Bruce’s skin, and when you skirt up beside him, you slip the paper into his jacket pocket. He looks ethereal with the blue glow and it reflects off the white of his eyes, and as he glances into the depths, the colour tints his hair, too, and the collar of his shirt. 

“Is it reckless self-endangerment to want to go in there?” he asks. 

“I’d call it curiosity.” 

He stands and stares, down into the luminous depths, and then says, “I don’t think I should.” He runs a hand through his hair for a moment, and then turns to you. “Here - now - I don’t know if Thor is alive, or if he isn’t, and what happened to him here, and if I go down there, and I  _ understand _ , then - it makes it all real.” He teeters. “If I stand here forever, he’ll always be alive.” 

You think of the video footage, and then you think about Carol; you know that she’s here, know that she went into that tunnel. You’ve never met anyone as determined as her. Really, you couldn’t help but admire her; and like Bruce, if you never go down there, Carol will always still be alive. 

“You don’t have to go,” you say. 

It’s always seemed impossible before, the idea of turning back. 

This has always felt like something you’ve  _ had _ to do. 

But suddenly, Bruce is walking away from the tunnel, his shoes scuffing against the ground. He walks straight for the entrance and steps back out onto the beach, looking up to the strong blue of the sky and the glimmering lights beneath. You realise that something about him has changed; he seems lighter, as if the burdens of the world aren’t laid upon his shoulders anymore. If you’re honest, you do, too.

Before you leave, you strike a safety match, and set fire to the tunnel. 

You don’t know what it will do, what it will destroy: the lighthouse, for certain, but you don’t know how far the damage will spread and you don’t know what exists through the green glow. You don’t know how connected the organisms within the Shimmer are, but you do know that it will keep spreading further and further outwards unless you do something; and though what you’ve seen is beautiful, it’s  _ wrong _ . 

Perhaps just the Shimmer will go down, leaving behind it the landscape it has changed: the huge dolphin, the plant people, the bears and alligators, the flowers and the moss. 

Whatever happens, you owe it to those who died. 

When you emerge back out into the daylight, Bruce is with another figure, one that you recognise as definitely not Carol, holding him tight.

“Thor.” This is salvation. Maybe this is the reason why you’ve been holding on to Bruce for so long, believing in him as you traced patterns on the back of his neck: his salvation has always been achievable. Yours is not. You’ve known that he’s always had this opportunity for peace, to be with the man he so clearly loves more than life; but there has never been that uncertainty with Bucky. 

You smile. You’ve done this for him. You’re proud of yourself; and of course, always, for him. You love Bruce Banner because you’re proud of him. He is quiet strength, anticipation, the rainfall before the storm. 

He, like you, has always been waiting for this.

You know that you’ve done, now, what you were meant to do. You don’t know if that’s his Thor, or one refracted; but you know that, to him, it doesn’t matter. 

You are ready. Your veins are beginning to flower; your arms are sprouting ivy, chrysanthemum, daisies. What seems to be a branch is emerging from the dark bruise on your arm. You think of Bucky. He would be proud of you, too.

You tip your head back, watch the shimmering surface beneath the stars, and then you are nature.

**Author's Note:**

> so, bruce's tattoo is a reference to one of my other fics, [schumann resonances](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18885835), but they aren't connected, i just thought it'd be fun to make a little reference there. also, if you're curious, the pj harvey album that thor and bruce listen to is "let england shake", and the song they sing in the fic is "the last living rose". i also really love the idea of bruce being the last living rose ... 
> 
> but thank you so much for reading! i really appreciate you sticking with this fic!


End file.
